Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

This is a story that could have come straight from the pages of the US literary superstar Jonathan Franzen.It involves an Australian sporting legend, a dead and overlooked Australian author and Franzen himself. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has weighed into a stoush in Watsons Bay in which residents are fighting plans by the Socceroo goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer for his 1880s harbourfront house Boongarre, also known as the Stead House 14 Pacific Street was the childhood home of the author Christina Stead

IT was a two-year fight between a property developer and a Hollywood director over a timber deck and two palm trees at a $28 million home on one of Sydney's most prized beachfronts. In one corner was Mad Max director George Miller; in the other real estate guru and former commodities trader Vaughan Blank George Miller versus Vaughan Blank: War on the Sydney waterfront

Winners, losers - and revenge The stuff of Bohemian Drama Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on?

In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he continued, it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” Such guilt made for an elusive quarry, however. It was hard to identify and hard to understand, and even harder to counteract, since it so frequently dwelled at an unconscious level and could easily be mistaken for something else.

• The Moral Economy of Guilt [On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? Fair Chase - new explanation of how humans became hunters; Music hits the brain like sex. So can neuroscience distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with?Striking a False Note ; Every year, Washington swells with 20,000 interns. They fetch coffee, drive down wages, and add yet another sexual frisson to the halls of power]• · · Bernard-Henri Lévy, moral philosopher and vain gadfly, has taken many admirable stands--on Communism, Bosnia, Darfur. So why is this well-coiffed adventure seeker so hated The Strenuous Life ; World War II revisionism – Churchill as war criminal, Allied bombers as terrorists – is often crude, but not without value. It adds complexity to our view of the past. Adam Kirsch explains... Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’? • · · · We are known by the trail of 0’s and 1’s we leave in our wake. Who owns that information? Is sharing it – creating a data commons – a civic duty?; Harvard has lost faith in itself. Tradition has been abandoned, says Harvey Mansfield, and all that remains is prestige. Harvard will hold on to that, because somehow it can be used to deflate its pretensions• · · · · At MIT, everyone is eccentric – and it certainly pays. Alumni have founded 25,800 companies, which generate revenues of about $1.9 trillion...; Literature and law. At the Supreme Court, Hemingway and Wittgenstein loom large. Not so the scribblings of legal scholars, which are of no use and no interest to Chief Justice Roberts... Keep the Briefs Brief, Literary Justices Advise• · · · · · To some, the tension between security and privacy melts away with a simple retort: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” But it isn’t true. Even upstanding Arts & Letters Daily readers have things to conceal.. Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' ; Word processors were going to liberate us from paperwork: “Machines should work, people should think.” But neither ideal is often enough the case. Now what?.. Paperwork Explosion • · · · · · Veteran journalist Stuart Washington Google Australia's real strength is in services, not sales; Light-footed Google in $4.6bn tax dodge ;BusinessDay's Stuart Washington yesterday won the $5000 Australian Council of Superannuation Investors media award for his coverage of the collapse of the Albury fund manager Trio Capital, in which investors lost $125 million. He gave this acceptance speech at the award ceremony. Using elaborate corporate structures in exotic Caribbean tax havens, Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million, with ASIC eventually finding a lawyer based in Hong Kong, Jack Flader, playing an instrumental role. Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-centered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we are genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success adds to...rather than detracts from... our lives.-Stephen R. Covey on recognition

The rewards go to the risk-takers, those who are willing to put their egos on the line and reach out to other people and to a richer, fuller life for themselves.-Susan RoAne

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

From the School of Working Life I've often said there a few things more insulting than false modesty and Media Dragon I have no intention of insulting you with it ;-)-There’s so many sides to Media Dragon, we are round

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Yet even the liberal democracies have claimed that sometimes they require a place in the shade – condemning Wikileaks for publishing their confidential information. Many people are convinced that Wikileaks is a force for good; others condemn it as being equivalent to a terrorist organisation that detonates explosive information rather than bombs. Are governments justified in their condemnation of Wikileaks and merely being responsible in protecting their secrets? Could the world really survive an unbridled commitment to transparency?For: Professor Stuart ReesAgainst: Alexander Downer -Thursday 16 June 2011 Wikileaks is a force for good City Recital Hall Angel Place

Silver Screen L&C/C&L: Cover to Cover After the Prague SpringTo make progress, you have to make a mess-Peggy Lee (quoted in George Simon, "Hooray for Love!," Metronome, December 1948)

If one simply wants to make a living by putting words on paper, then the BBC, the film companies and the like are reasonably helpful. But if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged--something rather like a house sparrow--and one gets on better if one realises one's position from the start.-George Orwell, "The Cost of Letters" (Horizon, September 1946)

When you’re in a consumer society, one of the ways to make yourself feel better is to spend. When that doesn’t feel right any more, or isn’t possible, you look for other outlets. It’s not just about mental wellbeing or self-help; it’s about cultivating your mind — but without being snobby or pretentious. The most popular talks, she concedes, are always on the topics of love and work, but the approach is anything but Bridget Jonesy. A recent workshop may have been titled “How necessary is a relationship?”, but the conversation took in the poet David Whyte and the psychologist Anthony Storr’s book Solitude.

• Living Well [The School of Life has been described as a Chemist for the mind ; “The rose,” says Umberto Eco, “is so rich in meanings that it hardly has any meaning left.” Not so. The bloom remains potent with symbolism The tale of the rose]• · Travel can be madly exasperating, especially if you write for a living. One of the reasons why Mrs. T and I tend to gravitate to familiar lodgings when on the road is that, like most writers, I prefer to work in familiar surroundings. From ocean to ocean, forever ; Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? The Moral Economy of Guilt • · · The mixed fortunes of Prague's 'European Hollywood' What began as the joint dream of two Prague brothers has become one of the most important centers of filmmaking in Europe: Barrandov Studios Barrandov Studios at 80 ; “The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million” according to the new article in Wired this month. I am a huge fan of Pixar films, and find the emotion that is baked into their animated films breath-taking. One of the secrets of Pixar’s blockbuster success ; Often spot-on, sometimes creepy, David Thomson’s masterwork is the most influential book ever written about the movies—and the most infuriating. My Villawood Love Story ; Drama on Sydney Harbour Bridge and Lockdown • · · · Jupiter lined up with Venus, Mercury and Mars in a celestial dance early in the morning Down Under. The alignment of the four planets happens only once every 50-100 years, and very rarely on Friday the 13th. The planets align over Sydney; "There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say." Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave Planets cluster for once-in-a-lifetime viewing; Sunday, May 22, 2011 is going to be a very bad day for people who are not good Christians, because at 6pm on Saturday, May 21, the Rapture is going to happen:-) • · · · · Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a political ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. Bear Pit ; Book titles are a touchy subject for writers. It’s not rare to hear an author complain in private about one of his or hers, and ache to reach back in time to swap it for something else. A different title for a fizzled book might have meant a different life for it. A Graphic Memoir That Earns the Designation • · · · · · Despite the lack of food, there was a sense of optimism in the air. People discussed politics with intensity – a fervour that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, the Russians I met told me. My perestroika generation ; There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round Planet Dylan

CODA:

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.-John Burroughs

Sunday, May 15, 2011

On Gabbie's and Dragon's birthday, I think I’ll take this advice and forgive all who have oppressed media dragons. Not forever, just for today. To forgive the oppressor is the medicine that heals Happy Latin Amerikan Birthday Gabbie

Friday, May 13, 2011

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;He knew human folly like the back of his hand,And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,And when he cried the little children died in the streets.-W.H. Auden, "Epitaph on a Tyrant" (courtesy of Peter W and Larraine; Bob and Sue; Irma and Garth)

OK, OK, I know: both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are cultural inventions, full stop. But I’m nonetheless gonna lay a bit of biology on this, for the same reason famously given for why climb Everest … because it’s there

Because It Was There We can’t help believing what we read. Spinoza said as much 400 years ago Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.-Hugh Kingsmill, The Progress of a Biographer

Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously described journalism as the “first rough draft of history” in a speech to Newsweek correspondents in 1963 — but as a new research paper from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, that role is increasingly being played by social media such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. The latest example is the coverage of the Osama bin Laden raid, which triggered questions about whether the person sharing news via social media was a journalist or not

• How Social Media Creates a Rough Draft of History [ A Canadian blogger has announced his own death in a heart-wrenching entry written before he succumbed to cancer posted on the day he died.Derek Miller,41,chronicled his battle with the disease since diagnosis in 2007,winning thousands of loyal readers. - You imagine it can't happen to you, and then it does. Life and Death ; What your literature professors tell you is true after all: reading narrative fiction helps make you more socially skilled. You become a better reader of other people’s minds and better able to navigate your complex social world. On the other hand, reading non-fiction does not seem to improve your social abilities]• · Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani programmer who earned Internet fame on Sunday by inadvertently live blogging the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden, is handling his 15 minutes -- and a never-ending barrage of media requests -- with uncommon good humor.Bin Laden raid blogger enjoying his new-found fame Sohaib Athar ; From blogger to published author is the goal of many a blogger Kerri Sackville - How did you do it?• · · A prominent blogger is planning a book exposing philandering politicians to coincide with the election. Blogger Cameron Slater plans to dish the dirt on male and female MPs from across the political spectrum. He said he had kiss-and-tell stories from women who claimed to have had affairs with male politicians, including one who said she had slept with three past and present ministers. Other sources included drivers and security staff. If you're an MP and you're partying, it's game over. The benchmark will be unethical behaviour.; NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion • · · · With over 10 million users, Blogger is significantly more popular than WordPress, the second on the scale of in-demand blog-hosting services. That may be because Blogger was established well before Google purchased the company, earning the early trust of the blogosphere Google’s Blogger Gets Geo-Location ; "If you've got nothing to hide," many people say, "you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." Others argue that we must sacrifice privacy for security. But as Daniel J. Solove argues in this important book, these arguments and many others are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so. The debate between privacy and security has been framed incorrectly as a zero-sum game in which we are forced to choose between one value and the other. Why can't we have both? If you've got nothing to hide • · · · · THANKFULLY, there's no law against bullying on the floor of the NSW Parliament. The first week of Parliament saw Labor get exactly what voters prescribed in March – a black eye Barry O'Farrell happily played bully-in-chief ; The Premier's trust-building agenda is being undermined by mixed messages ; Taste of Shallowness ;Using platitudes like “remarkable” and “dazzling” in flap copy is forgivable, but calling a book “funny” when it is anything but is a much worse crime Premier's list shows who's in and who's out• · · · · · How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex The Pleasures of Imagination ; Playing the game in China: The Mafia versus the Prince and his Ministry of Truth

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Greg aka Grog, noted that by and large the coverage of the Australian Budget 2011 in the newspapers was very good. Unanswerable Prayers to be answered ... O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. ~Psalm 119:97

Compared to some countries, just about every single person in Australia is rich beyond their wildest dreams. Compared to some suburbs in Australia, 95% of Australians are poor.

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.— E.B. White, "The Art of the Essay" (Interview), The Paris Review1

Do something every day that you don't want to do;this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.-- Mark Twain

The Story So Far: Truth in Reporting Can digital journalism be profitable? Skype Purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion What's making money, what isn't, and why?

A new report from Columbia University faculty members Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Ava Seave, principal at Quantum Media and adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, addresses these questions about the financial state of digital journalism. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the business challenges that for-profit news organizations face with their digital ventures. The report, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, is being issued by the school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is committed to the research and advancement of journalism on digital platforms."

"I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."-Cyril Connolly, "Comment" (Horizon, May 1941)

Saturday, May 07, 2011

In the center of Prague is a statue of the early 15th-century Czech church reformer Jan Hus that bears the motto: “Truth will prevail.” Thanks to Kovály’s memoir that motto, at least as it pertains to the 20th century, is being borne out.

Deb Richards has worked as a reporter, producer and executive producer on some of the most prestigious programs on Australian current affairs television, including ABC's Four Corners, Lateline and Media Watch programs as well as SBS-TV. She is a multi-award winner, and in 1999 she was joint winner of the Gold Walkley -- Australia's top award for excellence in journalism Gold Walkley The selling of journalism Cash for Comment

There is only one rule. Astonish us! Here’s a test: You now have thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century. What book would you choose? Of course, half a minute doesn’t leave much room for reflection—once you’ve arrived at the end of this sentence, your time is all but up. Still, I doubt that most readers of The American Interest will have had much difficulty coming up with several classic works before the clock ran out. ;-) Jozef Imrich's Cold River :-) and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would be prime candidates to capture the Soviet side of the horror; Victor Klemperer’s secret diaries published in two volumes as I Will Bear Witness document in deep detail the Nazi side of the totalitarian coin. That Heda Margolius Kovály had to write a memoir about life under Nazism and Communism is a horror. That she did it so well is a gift

Thursday, May 05, 2011

A diplomat is one who thinks twice before saying nothing. -Jozef Imrich

It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. - Mark Twain

NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell will have to debate the controversial Barangaroo development in Parliament now that protesters have amassed more than 10,000 signatures opposing the Sydney project. Independent MP and Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore was formally presented with the signatures today, the first working day of the new Parliament. There is significant concern across the community about the future of Barangaroo - a very important public site, adjacent to our city and on our precious harbour, Cr Moore said at the presentation outside State Parliament Barangaroo

CODA: All the world is mad save for me and thee, and sometimes I wonder about thee: It’s always nice when former Prime Minister Paul Keating chimes in with an opinion on Australian politics, isn’t it? In a world where nothing is certain, at least you can always count on his sharp tongue to deliver a verbal whipping that is both insightful and reflecting the state of his mind Mad Bastard with bleeding heartIn the race of life always back self-interest…at least you know it's trying G'day scumbags: I have never killed a man but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure-A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating, a gentle needle A negative impression of Ramrods' manager Paul Keating lives with his mum in Potts Point and he is dating actress Julieanne Newbould who I always knew as Jules. Jules

PS: It was a cold winter day. An old man walked out onto a frozen cold river, cut a hole in the ice and dropped in his fishing line. He was there for almost an hour, without even a nibble, when a young boy walked out onto the ice, cut a hole in the ice not far from him. The young boy dropped his fishing line and minutes later he hooked a Largemouth Bass. The old man couldn't believe his eyes but chalked it up to plain luck. But, shortly thereafter, the young boy pulled in another large catch.The young boy kept catching fish after fish. Finally, the old man couldn't take it any longer. "Son, I've been here for over an hour without even a nibble. You've been here only a few minutes and have caught a half dozen fish! How do you do it?"The boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rrarm.""What was that?" the old man asked.Again the boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rarrm.""Look," said the old man, "I can't understand a word you're saying.The boy spit the bait into his hand and said, " You have to keep the worms warm!

Sunday, May 01, 2011

The Learning Decade Swimming outside the flags Four hundred years ago , British philosopher Francis Bacon declared that “Knowledge is Power.” And, until recently, many corporate leaders would have wholeheartedly agreed with him.

But, today, as we struggle to cope with an uncertain economy, complex globalization, and unprecedented technological transformation, executives on just about every continent increasingly believe that “Knowledge is Survival.” Companies around the world responded to the Great Recession by cutting and controlling costs to reap new eficiencies. The next challenge is growing the global economy; and corporate and government leaders now realize that learning-driven innovation is the most promising way to generate much-needed top-line revenue and the jobs that result. Indeed, learning has gained new prominence as a critical lever for performance. And it has seeded new strategies that are creating competitive advantage and diferentiation in boardrooms, conference rooms and work environments all over the world. To be sure, not every company is a learning company; but more and more organizations recognize that learning can help solve the most vexing economic and #nancial problems of the day. As a result, we predict that the years leading up to 2020 will be known as “The Learning Decade.”

• Critical lever for performance [The Wall St. Journal suggests that more kids are their own boss in this tough economic climate. At a time when it’s hard for high school students to find the typical jobs that see them through the summer, many are opening up shop, commercializing the proverbial lemonade stand and taking it to new levels... Who’s the Boss? proverbial lemonade stand ; You could be forgiven for thinking that the cold Spring of 2011, with its cutbacks, closures, price hikes and app-frenzy is not the best of all possible times to launch a new magazine, writes John L. Walters. Especially a beautifully printed quarterly targeted at affluent, stylish city-dwellers. Yet here comes Port, an independently financed start-up spearheaded by two art directors and an editor, brimming with confidence, big pictures and long articles. Port]• · Success is coming down to how comfortable we are with endings, Henry Cloud in Necessary Endings; Crime stories are a ghoulishly satisfying reminder that although murder is possible, it hasn’t yet happened to you.. Murder most entertaining. • · · In 1896, the Cambridge don Solomon Schechter climbed behind a wall in a Cairo synagogue and discovered the detritus of an entire civilization ; Over-stressed parents, Bryan Caplan has some advice: Stop trying so hard. Have more kids Pay less attention to them • · · · Bold Innovation Bold: How to Be Brave in Business and Win ; The least Indian of Indian leaders”: V.S. Naipaul's astute assessment of Gandhi, whose social conscience was forged reading Tolstoy in South Africa..; The best ideas prevail. Well, maybe not. We’re hard-wired to reject evidence and views that contradict our beliefs – these days, more than ever• · · · · For an economist like Peter Orszag, two career paths beckon: public intellectual or Wall Street mandarin; Stiglitzism or Rubinism ; Biblionecrophilia: The conversation about print’s demise has been consumed by nostalgia. As if Amazon will forgo e-profits after recalling the tactile thrill of curling up with a musty paperback..• · · · · · Selfless behavior has long baffled evolutionary theorists. But E.O. Wilson now claims that he can explain altruism. The response has not been kind... ; The Bible brims with contradictions, says Timothy Beal, but no matter: The Good Book is best read as a catalog of questions, not answers

If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

A tale of Cold River, manages to trap a tiny speck of theatre of absurd of the kommunist Czechoslovakia in amber and then put time in a bottle, forever uniting them in our collective memory and imagination ... History has failed us, but no matter

"... The most important expression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
~ T.S. Eliot lauding 'Cold River' in our dreams ;-)

A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.
~An Untouchable Fire: Remembering Aharon Appelfeld

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad
~ James Baldwin

Defying every expectation of what communism used to be, imagine a system where the key to success wasn’t hard work or merit, but conniving and politics. If you sold your soul to the devil, you were rewarded Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

The Cold (War) River is finished, I am sensible how imperfectly, but certainly to the best of my limited abilities ... WE HAVE NO VOICE, AND SOMETIMES IN THIS SHORT LIFE ON EARTH WE MUST SCREAM!

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is nothing original about me except a little original bohemian sin.
I hope you will be treated unfairly ...

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ... a literary treat you, insomniacs, can enjoy for years (because that's how long it will take you to get through it ...)]
~ John le Carre

Thomas Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for paranoid times ...

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ...
The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of contagious ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

"We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and elders past and present."

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Cold River and Media Dragon are not for everyone. It's for bohemians like you...
Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the Cold River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."
~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek or seeking the story of the Cold River ...Please suspend your disbelief: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.' Slavic Blues Memoir, the offspring of the slave narrative ...
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. For instance, not a lot of people know that 'Cold River' is everywhere as it is the history of the entire world: As every of the tyrant it has deposed ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all...
“One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land."
~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do.
Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”
~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

We can only compare Cold River to reading the Bible :-) So escape the beaten path ...

When you read your own work as something fresh, something strange, it can be very exciting – especially if there’s time to make revisions. But then, once published, you almost inevitably discover typos, mistakes, and causes for regret and even remorse. As in a lover’s quarrel, sometimes we wish we could take the words back. But it’s almost never possible. …

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“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

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Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.
It may seem really strange but I feel as though I actually died some time ago and I’m living in an afterlife. Only in the age of Amazon.com age is a Tale like Cold River by Imrich possible … in 21st century after all,the greatest things in life are shared on the web
Cold River: fast-moving digital waters

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind